Hilm
Giving up at page 106, I wasn't engaged with the mystery—the death of an Iranian filmmaker. Maybe if I had been more familiar with Iran history a lot of the background info dump would have felt richer in texture, but otherwise it felt so heavy and the excerpts of the letters in every other chapters didn't manage to raise the intrigue for me.
This may be the first memoir from an Indonesian who is part of the LGBTQ+ community that I read—regrettably I don't think there's a lot of these and there should be more. This book coincidentally made a fitting answer to my partner's hypothetical question: what would you do if you want to get out of Indonesia and live abroad?
My answer was, as a sobat kabupaten, I didn't dream of living abroad. Moving to a city was already a sea change. But reading about Arozak's path was eye opening.
Compared to memoirs and essays l've read recently, this reads like Linda Sarsour's We're in This Together. My partner pointed out that there's a book with which this book shares common themes: Matt Ortile's The Groom Will Keep His Name (Ortile is a Pinoy in the US). I think would have liked this book even more if Arozak gave the readers more space for suspense, tension, and feelings before moving to resolutions.
3.5 stars rounded up.
Its earnestness is showing strongly (which I like), if somewhat rough, and meandering with lots of affectations. Overly reliant on lots of cultural references which feels a bit all over the place. Several typos peppered the novel, which is unfortunately quite distracting.
Things I like: small-town set up (Probolinggo), wide ranging cast—possibly too many? But the numbers and character diversity are possibly instrumental in avoiding stereotypical descriptions of gays: there's all kind of gays here. (And an acknowledgment that one of the characters may be bisexual.)
The narrative structure is certainly a choice: commentary on each character's naming, epistolary style, a storyteller-like expositions, Q-and-A style chapter.. I can't say it 100% works. But this is short so in the end I basically read it in a sitting.
A highly recommended reading. Some quotes:
Chapter 1:
At no time, certainly in the last 3500 years, did people cease to live [in Palestine]. The Zionist catch-cry ‘A land without a people for a people without a land' was, when first uttered in the 19th century, palpably wrong.
For an Australian of British ancestry such a slogan necessarily touches a raw or sensitive chord. Australia was of course described as ‘terra nullius'. That genocide was practised on the Australian aboriginal cannot be denied. Readers interested in attempts by Australia to rectify the wrong might well start with the decision of the Australian High Court in Mabo and Another v The State of Queensland [1988]
—-
Chapter 3:
In 1928 [Transjordan] achieved modified independence sufficient to control immigration policy.
The indigenous people of Palestine, however, were not considered fit for independence or to have control over immigration before 1948. At any time before the end of WWII independence for Palestine would have meant an Arab immigration minister. An immigration minister, as John Howard and Philip Ruddock made very clear to Australians in the early years of this century, is a most important minister, because every sovereign nation has the right to say who is admitted and when.
It is ironic that the parts of the Arab world which achieved independence following the break up of the Ottoman Empire were the most socially, culturally, and economically backward, while the more sophisticated areas, including Palestine, were placed under the control of Western Christian nations.
—-
Chapter 4:
there is convincing evidence that Zionists prompted Jews in Arab countries to move to Israel. Iraqi Jews had no desire to adopt Zionism. Former CIA agent Wilbur Eveland asserts it was necessary for Zionists to attack Iraqi Jews to induce them to “flee to Israel, and that they planted bombs in Iragi synagogues and in an American building in an attempt to portray the Iragis as anti-American and to terrorise the Jews.”
—-
Chapter 5:
During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time 1,380,000-were driven off their homeland by the Israeli Army.
Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of the refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after the 1948 war.
—-
Chapter 7:
The International Court of Justice found that the right of self-defence did not apply because there was no armed attack against Israel by another state. Israel's problem was building the wall in the Occupied Territories. If Israeli settlers were not located there a situation of Israel's own making they would not require protection. The problem was they were seeking to defend its citizens in Occupied Territories where they had no right to be.
—-
Chapter 11:
Ilan Pappe has described Israel as a herrenvolk democracy; democracy only for the masters, for one ethnic group, which, given the space Israel controls, i.e. including the Territories, is not even a majority group. No known definition of democracy applies to Israel.
—-
Postscript
A final statement. The Jewish people, rightly, came out of World War II with the goodwill of the world. The state of Israel and those who support it, have, however, in my opinion, used up that goodwill.
Paul Heywood-Smith
27 July 2014
1.5/5, rounded down because the rating is deceptive.
I forgot why I picked it up, maybe it was free? But boy this is grating. The main character who's a veterinarian is dumb. The writer guy is written to give off a mysterious vibe... but came across as annoying. Both characters were so insecure (of the writing career, divorce?, overbearing mother) they ran hot and cold, and each got worked up over the dumbest things. Quitting this at 60%.
Also I didn't care much about their view on bisexuality here, and I didn't find people biting their lips cute. (18 counts. Yes I counted.)
A very easy read–conversational, even. Might be a good primer to asexuality for those less steeped in the literature. It made me want to reread [b:Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex 52128695 Ace What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex Angela Chen https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580804471l/52128695.SX50_SY75.jpg 73599792] to compare the two.(Yes, there's the JKR half-paragraph thing at the end, which is unfortunate. Between this and the many HP references throughout the one podcast episode I tried to listen to (I actually didn't know about the podcast until reading this book)... it is quite cringe and I'd say it would be better for the authors to dial it down.)
These lines from 2018 hit hard:
The posts encouraged a narrative that I disagreed with as much as I desperately sought to live up to it: that my accomplishments and my youth gave me value, that I was always in the upward climb, that burnout was an easily resolved footnote. It was as shortsighted as it was unsustainable.
I was doing everything right, I thought: I was working out, going to therapy, taking breaks. I had an incredibly kind and patient partner who was always there for me. I didn't understand why I couldn't just, through force of will, make myself okay.
For so long I'd put all my personal value in my success, as much as I knew that I shouldn't. I had climbed so high, never really stopping to rest, and I was so scared of failing—I didn't think I'd survive it.
I didn't know that failing was exactly what I needed.
3.5 stars rounded up.
It's a little messy and not exactly easy to follow. It gave me more Shia-Sunni historical history than what I had expected. Also more than expected: Saudi/middle eastern politics, ruminations on islam in Europe (the last chapter has a strong Islam apologia flavor). Of the twelve chapters, five aren't about the his hajj experience—but more about his spiritual journeys to get there/his perspectives after he returned.
In chapter three, he got circumcised as an adult before his pilgrimage to Mecca because, ‘the religious opinion that terrorizes my soul the most came via Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani [who] opined: if an uncircumcised pilgrim in ihram be he adult or discerning child, performs a tawaf, it is invalid. An [cut] penis could be a dangerous thing in the small Indian town I grew up in. But once there were riots. [My grandfather] recounted how his two best friends were stripped, genitally identified as Muslim, and hacked to death. In my many nightmares, my ihram would fall off in Mecca, subjecting unsuspecting pilgrims to my un-Muslim penis.' (p76-77)
He asked a female friend to join her. “Shahinaz was an old fried. She, like me, was gay. She was ‘Allah conscious' like her Somali parents in Paris, but Islam's strictures were not for her.” (P81) they were of course separated because of their genders.
When they finally start donning ihram:
“Upon donning the lower part of my ihram, after performing all rituals and making sure I wore no underwear, I realized the sexual potential of an unsheathed penis rubbing against this made in China towel fabric. ‘A horny gay man into mid-eastern types would be in paradise here, with all this man smell and exposed genitalia, I texted Shahinaz. We looked like the men I had seen in gay-hookup saunas during my first trip to the US in 1998. Also, fragrance was part of the long list of the forbidden while wearing ihram, making for an unpleasantly malodorous Hajj. We were innocents, she and I. No one had ever dared to tell us the unspeakable horrors that unfolded when unsheathed male genitalia rubbed against the bodies of hundreds of thousands of women, not separated in the holy mosque of Mecca. At peak time, the tawaf was violent. The majority of these men had never been in such extreme proximity to the bodies of women. And not every male pilgrim had the discipline of piety.” (P116-117)
After Hajj:
“For the first TV interview, the anchor asked me how the Hajj changed me. ‘How to deal with claustrophobia,' I said, laughing. ‘But more seriously it was a life-transforming journey because in Mecca I killed the part of me that questioned whether Islam would accept me. In its place was the certainty that it was up to me to accept Islam.'”
Read in June 2023 (Pride month!) but also hajj season (idul adha is on the 29th) and my mom just started her Hajj as I wrote this.
Juniper Fitzgerald‘s profile is very interesting. She has a PhD in sociology, but also a mother and a sex worker. She doesn't write much on her degree, other than in glimpses.
P69
It's decidedly not my fault or the fault of any sex worker that sometimes our survival depends on the transformations of men into pigs.
“Do ...do you really have a PhD?” my piggy stutters.
“Yes,” I coo, and roll my eyes. “I really do hold a doctorate.”
What I don't say is that academia necessitates my erotic labor too. What I don't say is that as an evergreen adjunct, my heady labor is far more precarious than the wars of my body. What I don't say is that there will always be far more men looking to be licked with a feminist text than students reeling to read it.
“Wha... what's our lesson today, Mistress?”
262 Dreams of AI Design:
Planes would fly just as well, given a fixed design, if birds had never existed; they are not kept aloft by analogies.
263 The Design Space of Minds-in-general
Any two AI designs might be less similar to each other than you are to a petunia. Asking what “AIs” will do is a trick question because it implies that all AIs form a natural class.
277 High Challenge
Timothy Ferris is worth quoting: To find happiness, “the question you should be asking isn't ‘What do I want?' or ‘What are my goals?' but ‘What would excite me?'”
278 Serious Stories
This was George Orwell's hypothesis for why Utopia is impossible in literature and reality: It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast
289 Something to Protect
In the gestalt of (ahem) Japanese fiction, one finds this oft-repeated motif: Power comes from having something to protect. I'm not just talking about superheroes that power up when a friend is threatened, the way it works in Western fiction. In the Japanese version it runs deeper than that.
In Western comics, the magic comes first, then the purpose: Acquire amazing powers, decide to protect the innocent. In Japanese fiction, often, it works the other way around.
I read the first three articles:
- The Old House at Home
- Mazie
- Hit on the Head with a Cow
My takeaway is that McSorley's, which is the focus of the first article seems like an interesting place to visit the next time I'm in New York. A quick search on YouTube suggests that the place still exists and open for business.
The writing itself is characteristics of a New Yorker article. It reads tightly, about the people of New York from the time it was written. Ordinary people, local weirdos. Barkeepers, their customs, movie theater workers, homeless folks. No one a biographer would devote years of their lives for.
But I don't deeply care about them, I don't live in New York and surely they're all dead now. The world in the 1930s is very different with the present day, nearly a century later. (The structure of the world could feel the same, but the trappings today are entirely modern.) So I wonder, why am I reading this book? (Also, as the foreword noted, some people who knew the people profiled here thought that these were inaccurate characterization of these individuals, and they were entitled to their opinions.)
Anyway this made me think about Humans of New York (on Instagram? Facebook?) and how HoNY feels very much like a direct kin of this book.
Baca buku horor ketika di rumah sendirian itu ngeri-ngeri sedap. Tapi makin sedap dengan:
- bumbu perseteruan kakak adik Louise dan Mark tentang rumah yang diwariskan orang tua mereka yang meninggal mendadak dalam sebuah kecelakaan misterius. Louise hidupnya sukses (lulus kuliah, kerja kerah putih di San Francisco, punya anak satu), Mark hidupnya berantakan (drop out dari BU lol trus kerja serabutan).
- wasiat orang tuanya sebagai kunci perseteruan: wasiat mendiang ayah mewariskan 100% rumah dan harta ke Louise kalau sang ibu meninggal lebih dulu. Wasiat mendiang ibu mewariskan 100% ke Mark kalau sang ayah meninggal lebih dulu.
- campur tangan keluarga besar, macam si sepupu yang bilang ke Louise: rumah orang tua kamu tuh harganya bisa sampai tiga per empat juta dolar. Duit lumayan tuh bisa buat anakmu nanti kuliah Ivy Lig dan ga cuma PTN dekat rumah (state school)
- misteri kematian adiknya ibunya Louise yang meninggal mendadak puluhan tahun silam. Kenapa semua keluarga besar generasi kakek-nenek Louise bersikukuh buat, udah relakan aja itu masa lalu. Ini adalah bagian trope yang paling menyebalkan karena things would get resolved earlier if people just talk?
- koleksi boneka angker. Ibunya Louise produksi boneka (dan taxidermy) buat ngajarin cerita-cerita gereja. Jumlahnya puluhan (ratusan?) berderet memenuhi rak di rumah, yang lalu dia wariskan ke Louise dalam wasiatnya.
Ini sebetulnya baca loncat-loncat karena merinding sendirian di rumah (Boy ga membantu).
I read:
- For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business by Seymour Krim
- Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
- Split at the Root by Adrianne Rich
I read Krim's essay because I thought reading about other people reflecting on their own failures would uplift me. But Seymour Krim, “At 51, ... I've published several serious books. I teach at a so-called respected university.” He taught at Columbia and Iowa. In this day and age, getting a[n academic] job? And thinking of himself as a failure? This turns out to be just another woe-is-me that I had little patience for.
James Baldwin's essay was interesting, because it was so angry. Mainly to his father, “On the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride.”
I had never read Baldwin before, but I've heard of the praises others heaped on his work [Adrienne Rich, a dozen pages later: “In the 1950s, I had read all kinds of things, but it was James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir who had described the world–though differently–in terms that made the most sense to me.”], so my expectation was high. Too high.
Adrienne Rich's essay stayed in my mind for days. The subtitle was, “An Essay on Jewish Identity.” She began, “For about fifteen minutes I have been sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. Trying to be honest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to me so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary. These are stories I have never tried to tell before.” I'd like to write an essay like this.
“In a long poem written in 1960, I described myself as ‘Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew, Yankee nor Rebel.' I was still trying to have it both ways: to be neither/nor, trying to live with my Jewish husband in the predominantly gentile Yankee academic world of Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
Knowing we shared a city this made me more intrigued. She went to Harvard, married a man who later became an economics professor at the university.
“I was married in 1953, in the Hillel House at Harvard, under a portrait of Albert Einstein. My parents refused to come. I was marrying a Jew, of the ‘wrong kind' from an Orthodox Eastern European background. My father saw this marriage as my having fallen prey to the Jewish family, Eastern European division. Like many women I knew in the fifties, living under a then-unquestioned heterosexual imperative, I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family.”
“By the time I left my marriage, after seventeen years and three children, I had become identified with the women's liberation movement. The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs and her first full-fledged act was to fall in love with a Jewish woman.”
“Some time during the early months of that relationship, I dreamed that I was arguing feminist politics with my lover. I had been, more or less, a Jewish heterosexual woman; but what did it mean to be a Jewish lesbian? ... `Can a Woman Be a Jew?' I saw Judaism, simply, as yet another strand of partriarchy; if asked to choose I might have said: I am a woman, not a Jew. (But, I always added mentally, if Jews had to wear yellow stars again, I too would wear one. As if I would have the choice to wear it or not.)”
“I would have liked, in this essay, to bring together the meanings of anti-Semitism and racism as I have experienced them and as I believe they intersect in the world beyond my life. But I'm not able to do this yet. Nothing has trained me for this. My ignorance can be dangerous to me, and to others. Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.”
“This essay, then, has no conclusions: it is another beginning, for me. It's a moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability. I know that in the rest of my life, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged.”
The book is available at: https://archive.org/details/PhillipLopateTheArtOfThePersonalEssay/
